Nesting Depth Metric

One of my fundamental coding practices is to avoid nesting depth in methods. A really good explanation of this point has been made by Patrick Smacchia, author of NDepend. NDepend, speaking as a purchaser of the product, is a very cool tool for measuring an application. I won't belabor the technique, since Patrick explains it well, but I just want to stress it because I think it so critical. I call this the early exit strategy. Rather than have nested if statements, I return from a function as soon as possible. So, instead of having a more complex boolean statement or nested ifs, I would have a simpler expression with two if statements, each of which would return from its function if appropriate. As Patrick shows, this also applies to a continue statement, to abort further process on the current iteration of a for loop.